[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
(Note: this article was originally written before the US assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani on January 2nd)
Trump kept the promise he made to AIPAC in March 2016: “We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.” Its fulfillment gave a timely support to Netanyahu, whose popularity in Israel is entirely based on his capacity to manipulate the United States, of which he brags. Commenting in May 2018 on Trump’s decision, Netanyahu paid him this compliment:
“This will be remembered the way we remember the Cyrus declaration of 2500 years ago, when he told the exiles of Babylon, ‘you can go back and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.’ This is a historical moment and we will always remember.”
Cyrus is that Persian king whose spirit “Yahweh roused … to issue a proclamation” and “build him a temple in Jerusalem,” according to the Book of Ezra (1:1-2) A successor to Cyrus later appointed Ezra to oversee the building. For his decree, Cyrus is bestowed the title of Yahweh’s “Anointed” (Mashiah) by the prophet Isaiah:
“Thus says Yahweh to his anointed one, to Cyrus whom, he says, I have grasped by his right hand, to make the nations bow before him and to disarm kings: […] It is for the sake of my servant Jacob and of Israel my chosen one, that I have called you by your name, have given you a title though you do not know me. […] Though you do not know me, I have armed you.” (Isaiah 45:1-5)[1]
Yahweh, who “roused Cyrus’ spirit” and “grasped him by his right hand,” stands, of course, for “Jewish Power”.
Netanyahu hailed Trump as a modern-day Cyrus on several occasions, and his enthusiasm was echoed on Fox News, when Jeanine Pirro declared: “Donald Trump recognizes history. He, like king Cyrus before him, fulfills the biblical prophecy…”
Trump was like Cyrus again in March 2019, when he signed a decree recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights (top photo). It inspired Miriam Adelson, wife of Trump’s biggest donor, to comment that the President deserves his “Book of Trump” in the Bible.[2] Israel’s history is always biblical, one way or another.
I was made aware of this “Trump is Cyrus” meme by Adam Green’s impressive film “God’s Chosen People”. It seems that Trump was already promoted as a new Cyrus to Christian Zionists during the 2016 campaign. It has also been noted that, just a couple of months after taking office, Trump used the occasion of the Persian new year (Nowruz) to mention in a White House statement to the Iranian embassy that “Cyrus the Great, a leader of the ancient Persian Empire, famously said that ‘freedom, dignity, and wealth together constitute the greatest happiness of humanity.’” Using the name Cyrus rather than the form Koresch preferred by historians is an implicit reference to the Bible story. Zionists like Jonathan Cahn believe this was a cryptic message: “It was not only that the president had issued a public statement in which he spoke of Cyrus but that he spoke words attributed to the ancient king. In other words, he wasn’t only speaking of Cyrus; he was now speaking as Cyrus.”[3] Such interpretation tells us more about the Zionists’ wishful thinking than about Trump’s real intention (who wrote that statement anyway?). But then, the Zionists have proven very good at fulfilling their wishful thinking.
Of course, moving the American embassy to Jerusalem is not exactly like rebuilding of the temple. But Trump’s announcement nevertheless boosted messianic yearnings for the Third Temple. Plans, funds, and even cultic personnel are all ready. Prayers are sent to heaven that an Iranian missile would mistakenly, by Yahweh’s hand, find its way on the Al-Aqsa Mosque to get rid of the last obstacle. Confident that Trump is the new Cyrus, the Mikdash Educational Center has minted medals with Trump’s portrait superimposed on Cyrus’ on one side, and the future temple on the other. Of course, ecstatic Jews and Evangelicals have no clue that the so-called Temple Mount never supported a temple at all: what they take for the walls of Herod’s Temple is actually the remains of the Roman fort housing the legion that destroyed the Temple (as demonstrated archeologically in the documentary “The Coming Temple”).
It is not the first time that a Christian statesman is compared to Persian king Cyrus. It was said before of Lord Balfour and Harry Truman. Netanyahu actually referred to both of them when meeting Trump in the Oval Office in March 2018:
“I want to tell you that the Jewish people have a long memory, so we remember the proclamation of the great king, Cyrus the Great, the Persian king 2,500 years ago. He proclaimed that the Jewish exiles in Babylon could come back and rebuild our Temple in Jerusalem. We remember a hundred years ago, Lord Balfour, who issued the Balfour Proclamation that recognized the rights of the Jewish people in our ancestral homeland. We remember 70 years ago, President Harry S. Truman was the first leader to recognize the Jewish state. And we remember how a few weeks ago, President Donald J. Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Mr. President, this will be remembered by our people through the ages.”
Zion is a biblical program
Netanyahu’s declaration provides a good opportunity for reflecting on the importance of biblical narratives in Israel’s national consciousness, propaganda, diplomacy, and geopolitical strategy, and to analyze the Cyrus pattern in the history of the relationship between Israel and imperial powers.
Netanyahu is certainly typical of Israeli leaders’ tendency to see history as a perpetual reenactment of Bible stories. In 2015, he dramatized his phobia of Iran by referring to the Book of Esther, in an allocution to the American Congress that he managed to program on the eve of Purim, which celebrates the happy ending of the Book of Esther—the slaughter of 75,000 Persians.
Esther’s story is not unlike Ezra’s: through her, Yahweh “roused the spirit” of another Persian king, Ahasuerus, to protect the Jews and hang their persecutors. This last December, Trump became a modern-day Ahasuerus when he signed an executive order against anti-Semitism and Israel-boycott in university campuses.
Actually, the Book of Esther, Netanyahu’s favorite, is the only book in the Tanakh that makes no mention of God, which proves that “biblical” does not necessarily mean “religious”. This is a point sadly misunderstood in the Christian world.
The biblical foundation of secular Zionism is underestimated, even denied, by critics of Zionism, even when it is affirmed by the Zionists themselves. It is true that Theodor Herzl did not argue in biblical terms for his 1896 program, The Jewish State. Yet he named his movement after the Bible: Zion is metonymic designation for Jerusalem used by biblical prophets, especially Isaiah. Later on, the pioneers of the Yishuv and the founders of the Jewish State were steeped in the Bible. Ben-Gurion, an avowed atheist, used to say: “There can be no worthwhile political or military education about Israel without profound knowledge of the Bible.”[4] That statement should be taken seriously. If it is true for Zionists, then it is also true for the critics of Zionism: there can be no real understanding of Israel without profound knowledge of the Bible. The Tanakh is the alpha and the omega of Zionism. Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the 1967 Six-Day War, justified his annexation of new territory in a book titled Living with the Bible (1978).
One important thing that Ben-Gurion learnt from the Bible is that Israel’s destiny is not to be a nation like others, but the center of the world and the ruler of all nations. When asked in 1962 his prediction for the next 25 years, he declared that Jerusalem “will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”[5] He was referring to Isaiah 2:2-4, announcing the messianic Pax Judaica, when “the Law will issue from Zion” and Israel “will judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples.” Ben-Gurion’s prophetic vision, which may be called Universal Zionism (the title of a book by the director of a Jerusalem Summit that promotes that vision), has been shared more or less by all subsequent Israeli leaders up to Benjamin Netanyahu.
It should be evident, and it surely is to Netanyahu as it was to Ben-Gurion, that for Jerusalem to become the headquarter of a “Supreme Court of Mankind” that will replace the United Nations, another world war is necessary. The fall of the American Empire, or at least its total transformation into Zionist occupied territory, is also part of the plan.
The Tanakh does not just teach Zionists the ultimate goal, it also shows them the way to go: Cyrus’ edict reproduced in the Book of Ezra, whether genuine or fake, is the blueprint for Zion’s exploitation of the Empire’s foreign policy in modern times. Transforming Gentile leaders into Cyrus-like figures is the rule of the game. That is what I would like to illustrate below.
Jeremiah, Babylon and Persia
Before we recall the way the proto-Zionists Ezra and Nehemiah worked the Persian administration into giving them control over Jerusalem, let’s go back one century earlier. In 588 BC, to subdue the rebellious Judeans, Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II besieged and finally burned Jerusalem, then deported some of its elites (Jeremiah 52:30 gives the plausible figure of 4,600 people). The exiles enjoyed broad autonomy in Babylon, and some acquired wealth and influence. Speaking on behalf of Yahweh, Jeremiah wrote to them, from Egypt: “Work for the good of the city to which I have exiled you; pray to Yahweh on its behalf, since on its welfare yours depends” (Jeremiah 29:7). Yahweh even asked Jeremiah to convey the following message to the kings of Syria-Palestine:
“For the present, I have handed all these countries over to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, my servant … Any nation or kingdom that will not serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and will not bow its neck to the yoke of the king of Babylon, I shall punish that nation with sword, famine and plague, Yahweh declares, until I have destroyed it by his hand.” (Jeremiah 27:6-8)
But twenty chapters later, Jeremiah announced the “vengeance of the Lord” on the Babylonians and called on their Persian enemies to “slaughter and curse with destruction every last one of them” (50:21). In the same spirit, the author of Psalm 137 wrote: “Daughter of Babel, doomed to destruction, […] a blessing on anyone who seizes your babies and shatters them against a rock!” The reason for this violent shift in Yahweh’s sentiment was that the situation had changed: in 555 BC, a prince named Nabonad seized power in Babylon. He made war against the Persian king Cyrus (Koresch). It is believed, by Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz in particular, that the Judean exiles in Babylon sided secretly with the Persians, and perhaps “opened secret negotiations with Cyrus.” That would explain “the kindness shown later on to the Judeans by the Persian warrior, and their persecution by Nabonad.”[6]
Attack likely to inflame tensions, potentially spark new conflict in Middle East.
BAGHDAD — The United States killed Iran’s top general and the architect of Tehran’s proxy wars in the Middle East in an airstrike at Baghdad’s international airport early on Friday, an attack that threatens to dramatically ratchet up tensions in the region.
The targeted killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, could draw forceful Iranian retaliation against American interests in the region and spiral into a far larger conflict between the U.S. and Iran, endangering U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria and beyond.
The Defense Department said it killed Soleimani because he “was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.” It also accused Soleimani of approving the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad earlier this week.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that a “harsh retaliation is waiting” for the U.S.
Iranian state TV carried a statement by Khamenei also calling Soleimani “the international face of resistance.” Khamenei declared three days of public mourning for the general’s death.
Also, an adviser to Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani warned President Donald Trump of retaliation from Tehran. “Trump through his gamble has dragged the U.S. into the most dangerous situation in the region,” Hessameddin Ashena wrote on the social media app Telegram. “Whoever put his foot beyond the red line should be ready to face its consequences.”
Later commentary on Iranian state TV called Trump’s order to kill Soleimani “the biggest miscalculation by the U.S.” in the years since World War II. “The people of the region will no longer allow Americans to stay,” the TV said.
The airport strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, and five others, including the PMF’s airport protocol officer, Mohammed Reda, Iraqi officials said.
Trump was vacationing on his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, but sent out a tweet of an American flag.
The dramatic attack comes at the start of a year in which Trump faces both a Senate trial following his impeachment by the U.S. House and a re-election campaign. It marks a potential turning point in the Middle East and represents a drastic change for American policy toward Iran after months of tensions.
Tehran shot down a U.S. military surveillance drone and seized oil tankers. The U.S. also blames Iran for a series of attacks targeting tankers, as well as a September assault on Saudi’s oil industry that temporarily halved production.
The tensions take root in Trump’s decision in May 2018 to withdraw the U.S. from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, struck under his predecessor, Barack Obama.
The 62-year-old Soleimani was the target of Friday’s U.S. attack, which was conducted by an armed American drone, according to a U.S. official. His vehicle was struck on an access road near the Baghdad airport.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 29 November 2019 18:16.
Negotiating Moral Orders, European Post Modernity and DNA Nations
Daniel Sienkiewicz
In this stream, I will indulge in a literal stream of consciousness in order to cover the platform of European peoples advocacy that I have cultivated over the years, not particularly concerned with order of the material, as it is of a complete enough system that cris-crossing it from various angles as they emerge to my consciousness will invariably flesh out its stable reference points to provide understanding for those who can be reasoned with.
A more formal presentation can wait for another time.
I do not want to undertake a formal presentation or a pretext of rigorously ordered priority of discussion at this point as that will delay the unfolding and imparting of ideas that already have verifiable systemic coherence beneath and important messages thereby, especially for persons concerned for the defense and well being of European peoples.
...
Comments:
1) I’ll start to note some things that I’d forgotten to mention, one of them being Heidegger’s attendance to our “emergent qualities” - as individuals (and as a genetic group, by inference); which is also an anti Cartesian notion, but looked at from this angle not so much a concern for taking us out of Cartesian estrangement by directing us into interaction through Dasein (there being) but rather an emphasis on resisting Cartesian estrangement by holding fast to our inborn trajectory and following its teleological path for us rather than getting drawn into the inauthentic calling from our path by “the they” ...it would be a correction thus, to an over emphasis on social concern to the detriment of our inherited biological nature. I must credit Guessedworker for taking me to task and holding me to proper account to Heidegger’s concern for emergentism.
2) The next thing that I believe that I forgot to mention - and when you forget something in a situation like this, it tends to be something that you take for granted because its so obviously important - is the marketing campaign circa 2008 that was the Alt Right and Alt lite, as a Gottfried/Regnery NPI Spencer loosely formed political perspective/ angle / agenda - Spencer being a useful right wing elitist reactionary to front the re-branding of “Paleoconservatism”, a Paleoconservatism 2.0, to direct not just a big tent but a tent of tents (a tentosphere) of broader based and younger reactionaries against political correctness (Frankfurt School) whose commonality was some kind of anti-social stigma.
The father of Paleoconservatism was Frank Meyer, a Jewish man, originally a Marxist, whose “paleoconservative concept” was “fusionism”, a fusion of ideas that don’t really go together, that is to say enlightenment/modernist objectivism and Judeo/Christianity. Despite the fact that these ideas don’t really go together, it was a tension of conflicting concerns that was familiar to mainstream America from the onset of the United States and was seen as a life raft for those with conservative values. Frank Meyer became the mentor of sorts to President Ronald Reagan, the first prominent paleo-con, who was joined in this ideology by Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, Joe Sobran and Sam Francis.
By the 1990’s this opportunistic controlled opposition that was Paleoconservatism was out maneuvered by the other side of controlled opposition that is the Neoconservates, to make way for Israeli operation clean break to secure the realm around Israel using American military might - to create Israel friendly regimes starting with ousting Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But I digress.
By 2008 when objectivist “invisible hand” economic program by Randian devote and Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan had run the boom bust cycle to the greatest bust (theft) ever with the mortage and securities meltdown, that was when Gottfried, Horowitz et al recognized a dangerous intersectionality with the Cultural Marxism that their tribesman had been promoting through academia: They needed to make sure that European peoples didn’t make proper use of social organizing strategies via properly understood post modern and leftist socially conscientious ideas to organize as a European ethnonational left, to unionize as a bounded discreet people (forming in and out groups, the opposite of the promoted confusion of left/liberalism, and rather to conserve and and hold accountable what is within the “union”) who would then, in holding members to account, look at elites and see who was betraying them by opening their would be union bounds to scabbery (so to speak) and they would see YKW in tandem with right wing sell outs, encouraged to a no account objectivism, socially unconscientious ‘that’s just the way it is-ness’, along with liberals, incentivized in much the same way to take license to betray “union”, conservative interests, on the basis of no account pseudo objectivist, “that’s just the way it isness.”
As YKW had greater hegemony, power and influence than ever with the 2008 melt down/theft, they sought to get European reactionaries to not only identify as right, far right objectivist Cartesian reactionaries as always, but to identify as an Alternative Right, which would specialize in criticizing “THE Left”, and a characterology thereof (a character with unnatural concepts, such as the call for universal equality that it seeks to apply to nature) that is to say, to chase after the red capes of distorted and just out right anti European political correctness as it had been marshaled to this intersection by YKW interests. - Oh, “those social justice warriors” how unrealistic, we don’t want any of that social justice now that the YKW, right wing sell outs and licentious liberals have more unjust and destructive power and influence than ever!
3) Another red cape (straw man misrepresentation of a good, social organization idea for us to chase after antagonistically, against our own organizational, homeostatic interests) that I’d forgotten to mention in this discussion, is false polemic against the concept of social justice and equality with a disingenuous rebut in the form of a misrepresentative concept of “human bio diversity”, misrepresented as a lateral matter of I.Q. (how convenient for elite betrayal, just the way it is) as opposed to human bio diversity being a horizontal matter of qualitative niche evolutionary differences that ought to be respected as ecologically fitting circumstances and systems, accountable as such, and not subject to false comparisons - rather, by contrast, utilizing the concept of commensurate and incommensurate paradigms, niches that are to be respected within a paradigm as integral part of the system, not to be disparaged as unequal by false comparison on an identical functional criteria. The refrain of “incommensurabilty” would also apply between peoples/paradigms in order to show respect for niche evolutionary differences of peoples, avoiding hubris and antagonism of false comparisons.
4) Yin Yang Scorpion
Sorry I fell asleep during the last part of the stream. It was 3:30 am where I am. Very interesting stream.
Reply from Daniel Sienkiewicz
No Problem Yin Yang ) Glad you found it interesting.
5) Another paradoxic rule of modernity’s performance requirement to value the new: “be different so that you can fit in.”
6) I also should have done a better job of answering Citizen Reporter’s request to clarify what is meant by hermeneutics. It is not merely narrative form, but an interactively engaged process of inquiry which allows participants to move back and forth from broad, more imaginative, historical and systemic perspectives - not only to generate enjoyable, useful and meaningful narrative, but also to generate hypotheses which may then be moved by the circulating process of hermeneutics to more rigorous and focused verification as need be. ..but as a process of inquiry, it allows one to re engage dasein from the Cartesian estrangement.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 21 November 2019 08:36.
Report: Sacklers using fake doctors, false marketing to sell OxyContin in China.
As Purdue files for bankruptcy, business in China is ramping up.
Beth Mole, for Ars Technica, 21 Nov 2019:
Consumer-sized bottles of prescription drugs sit on a shelf.
The mega-rich family behind the OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma is back to selling its highly addictive pain killer with underhanded tactics and deceptive advertising—this time in China, via its international company, Mundipharma. That’s all according to a searing new investigation by the Associated Press.
The Sackler family, which owns both Purdue and Mundipharma, is embroiled in litigation in the United States over its alleged role in sparking the country’s epidemic of opioid abuse and overdoses. Thousands of plaintiffs—many state and local governments—claim that Purdue and the Sacklers misled patients, doctors, and regulators on the addictiveness of their drugs, aggressively marketed them, and wooed doctors into over-prescribing them.
While Purdue has since declared bankruptcy and stopped promoting OxyContin in the US, the Sacklers seem to be employing the same detestable practices in China.
Based on documents and interviews with multiple Mundipharma representatives in China, the AP investigation found that reps were at times posing as doctors, providing debunked information that its long-acting opioids are safe and less addictive, and even illegally copying private medical records of patients to inform sales tactics.
When an AP reporter informed one of the Mundipharma reps that some of the marketing information was incorrect, she replied: “I’m shocked… Why after more than 10 years would they still do the same thing and go against the laws and regulations of society?”
In a response to the AP, Mundipharma said it promotes ethical behavior and legal compliance. It added: “We have detailed policies covering interactions with healthcare professionals, grants and donations, and sponsorships and incentives.”
The AP reported that China’s National Health Commission, National Medical Products Administration, State Administration for Market Regulation, and National Development and Reform Commission declined to comment. The Sackler family representatives did not respond to a request for comments.
Beth is Ars Technica’s health reporter. She’s interested in biomedical research, infectious disease, health policy and law, and has a Ph.D. in microbiology.
EMAIL .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) // TWITTER @BethMarieMole
Donald Trump and Gen. Qassem Soleimani (Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo)
